From Cheeta to Zaius

Monthly Archives: January 2013

Unless you are a lone code monkey you will be committed to attending meetings eventually. As a good code monkey you should hate losing your precious time hearing about whose responsibility was losing that client or selling that non-existing improvement that now you have to implement in exchange of peanuts. But before getting hands in work now you have to attend a new meeting to define the right software development methodologies to implement that idea…Does it sounds familiar to you?

That’s why a long time ago i become a mega fan of Zend A. Shaw‘s philosophy: “Programming, Motherfucker” but the destiny and , in a bigger an more direct way, the needs of the “startup” where i actually work, has put me in a DevOps position that requires me to attend a lot of meetings during the week.

That’s why I found so interesting this post about Meeting Rules at Feld Thoughts. Even in the jungle we need some rules and i couldn’t be more agree with Feld when he says that Scott Kevton,the CEO at Urban Airship , has defined in 8 straightforward principles so logical as to be rules that should apply to every meeting at every startup from now until forever.

0. Do we really need to meet?

1. Schedule a start, not an end to your meeting – its over when its over, even if that’s just 5 minutes.

2. Be on time!

3. No multi-tasking … no device usage unless necessary for meeting.

4. If you’re not getting anything out of the meeting, leave.

5. Meetings are not for information sharing – that should be done before the meeting via email and/or agenda.

6. Who really needs to be at this meeting?

7. Agree to action items, if any, at the conclusion of the meeting.

8. Don’t feel bad about calling people out on any of the above; it’s the right thing to do.

During the last months i’ve been involved in the resolution of a lot of php issues and some projects that allways required from developing my back-end skills. Arrived to this point i started to feel some hanckering from my old good friend javascript and all their frameworks.

That’s why i decided to do a fast and furious review of some tutorials and books during the next days starting from the framework with more mojo at front-end : JQUERY.